Pashto

Introduction

Pashto, also known as Afghan, Pushto, or Pashtu, is a member of the Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. It is spoken by over Pashtun Men 2.7 million people in Afghanistan, most of whom are ethnic Pashtuns who constitute over a third of the country's population. In Pakistan, Pashto is spoken by 9.7 million ethnic Pashtuns who live on the other side of the border with Afghanistan (Ethnologue).

Pashto was made the national language of Afghanistan in 1936 by royal decree. Today, it is one of the two official languages of Afghanistan along with Dari. Of the two languages, Dari enjoys greater prestige, hence most Pashtuns learn to speak Dari, but few Dari speakers learn Pashto. However, because of the political power of the Pashtuns, Pashto is a compulsory Afghan Mountains subject in Dari-medium schools, and is widely used as a language of government administration. Nevertheless, it failed to replace Dari as the major language of business and higher education.

In Pakistan, Pashto has no official status and is not taught in schools. Pashtun children are educated in Urdu.

Dialects

Hamid Karzai

Pashto can be divided into four dialect groups, based on the pronunciation of four consonants. For example, the second consonant in the name of the language, Pashto, is pronounced as a retroflex fricative [sh] in Kandahar, and as a palatal fricative in Kabul.

Northwestern spoken in Paktia province of Afghanistan
Northeastern spoken in Jallalabad, east of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan
Southwestern spoken in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The Kandahar version of Pashto has greater prestige and is considered the standard dialect of Pashto. In fact, the spelling system of Pashto is based on the Kandahar dialect.
Southeastern spoken in Quetta, Pakistan

The major dialect divisions themselves have numerous variants. In general, however, speakers of Pashto understand each other.

Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan, is an ethnic Pashtun born in Kandahar.

Structure

Sound System

Afghan Children

Pashtun women

Pashtun men

Pashtun children

Vowels

The stressed vowels of standard Pasho are /i/, /e/, //, /a/, //, /u/, /o/.
// represents the vowels of but and tuna.
// represents a long /a/.
In some dialects, the vowels /i/ and /u/ can be either short or long.
Pashto has a number of diphthongs, e.g., ay, y, y, oy, uy, aw, w.

Consonants
Besides the consonants common to most modern Iranian languages, Pashto also has dental affricates /ts/, /dz/ and a set of retroflex consonants borrowed from neighboring languages of the Indian subcontinent. They are produced with the tongue curled back so that its underside touches the roof of the mouth. Also, unlike other Iranian languages, Pashto allows consonant clusters at the beginning of syllables, e.g., xpa 'foot,' nwar 'sun.'

The chart below shows the consonant inventory of Pashto as reflected in the Kandahar dialect, but does not cover all the existing dialectal variations. In addition, there are some consonants in Pashto which do not occur in the speech of monolingual speakers, but only in the formal speech of bilingual educated people who speak both Pashto and Dari. They are called "elegant" phonemes. In the table below, they are given in parentheses.

.		Bilabial	Labiodental	Alveolar	Retroflex	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Stops	voiceless	p	....	t		.	k	(q)
Stops	voiced	b	.	d		.	g		.
Fricatives	voiceless	..	(f)	s			x		(h)
Fricatives	voiced	.	.	z					.
Affricates	voiceless	..	...	ts		t	..		.
Affricates	voiced	.	..	dz	.	d	.		.
Nasals	.	m	...	n.		.	..		.
Laterals	.	...	..s	l	.	..	..		.
Trills	.	...	..	r	.	.	.		.
Flap
Glides		w				j

retroflex, , , , , = no equivalents in English
and occur only in loanwords
= as in shape
= as in treasure
t = as in chap
d = as in jet
= glottal stop, similar to the glottal catch in uh-oh.
= no equivalent in English

Stress
Stress can fall on any syllable of a word. It can distinguish the meaning of otherwise identical words, e.g., áspa 'mare' and aspá 'spotted fever.'

Click here to listen to BBC radio in Pashto.

Grammar

Pashtun child

Pashtun woman

Pashtun man

Pashto is a highly inflected language with a complex system of noun declensions and verb conjugations. Its morphology is considerably more complex than that of modern Persian.

Noun phrase
Nouns and adjectives are marked for the following categories:

Two genders: masculine and feminine
Two numbers: singular and plural. There are many plural markers.
Three cases: direct, oblique, and vocative (only in the singular). Cases are marked with prefixes, suffixes or both. Direct case is used for both subjects and objects.
There are no articles.
There are three declensions for nouns, and five for adjectives.
There are first- and second-persons pronouns. Third person is represented by proximate and remote demonstrative pronouns (something like 'this' and 'yonder.'
All modifiers agree with the nouns they modify in gender, number, and case.

Verb phrase
The verb system of Pashto is typically Indo-European. Verbs agree with their subjects in person, number and gender. Below are some features of Pashto verbs:

Verbs have two stems: present and past.
Present stems can be simple or secondary.
Simple tenses are formed by the addition of personal endings to the two stems.
Secondary stems consist of a root + suffixes that indicate transitivity, intransitivity, and causality.
There are three tenses: present, past, and future.
There are two voices: active and passive.
There are two aspects: imperfective and perfective. Aspect is as important as tense.
There are four moods: indicative, conditional, imperative, and potential.
Past tense transitive sentences are formed as ergative constructions, i.e., transitive verbs in the past tense agree with the object rather than the subject of the sentence.

Word order
The normal word order in Pashto is Subject-Object-Verb. All modifiers precede nouns modified.

Vocabulary

Pashtun woman

Pashtun man

Pashto shares most of its vocabulary with other Iranian languages. It has also borrowed words from other languages. For instance, Pashto spoken in Pakistan contains a great many loanwords from Urdu. Due to the influence of Islam, Pashto has also borrowed many words from Arabic. Some of the oldest borrowings are from Greek and date back to the 3rd-century BC Greek occupation of the territory that is now Afghanistan. Pashto has also borrowed words from neighboring Indo-Aryan languages. Today, the most important source of borrowing is English, particularly in the areas of science, technology, politics, and the military.

Below are a few basic sentences and words in Pashto, given in transcription.

As salam aleikum	Hello
Da khoday-pe-aman	Good-bye
Lutfan	Please
Tashakor	Thank you
Abhaka	Excuse me
Ho	Yes
Na	No

Click here to listen to a few basic phrases and words in Pashto.
Click here to hear some Pashto words and sentences.

Below are the numerals 0-10 in Pashto.

0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10

sifer	yaw	dwa	dre	chalor	pinja	shpazh	oova	ata	nah	las

Writing

Kahn
Khosal Khan Khattak

Writing
The first written records of Pashto date back to the 16th century. Pashto has always been written with a modified Perso-Arabic script that contains additional letters to represent consonants specific to Pashto. Until the spelling system was standardized in the late 18th century, the representation of these consonants varied greatly. The Pashto alphabet, which has more vowel sounds than Persian or Arabic, represents the vowels more extensively than the Persian and Arabic alphabets. With the adoption of Pashto as a national language of Afghanistan in 1936, the writing system underwent some additional modifications that resulted in greater consistency. Various transliteration systemsused today for representing Pashto with Latin letters lack standardization and may be confusing.

Pashto has an extensive literary tradition. There are a number of classic Pashtun poets, most notably Khosal Khan Khattak (1613-1690), known as the Afghan warrior poet. Pashtun writers have adopted modern western literary forms such as the short story. Pashtun folk literature is the most extensively developed in the region. Besides stories set to music, Pashto has a large number of short folk poems, traditionally composed by women, reflecting their daily lives.

Click here to listen to Pashto poetry.

Resources

Click here to find out where Pashto is taught in the United States.
Click here to find learning materials for studying Pashto.

Online resources for the study of Pashto language and culture
Yamada Language Guide for Pashto
CAL Pashto Learning Materials
UCLA Language Profile for Pashto
English-Pashto Dictionary
Pashto-English Dictionary
Voice of America broadcasts in Pashto
BBC news in Pashto
Pashto
History of Pashto
Khyber.org